Discover Magazine | Environment

Numbers: Water, From Precipitation to Irrigation to Sanitation

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:10:00 -0600

Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:15:00 -0600

For most of us, “Googling” is synonymous with Web hunting: dredging up an old friend, say, or locating a late-night pizzeria. But the world’s leading search engine and its related applications are turning out to be powerful research tools, too. Scientists have begun tapping into Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google News to monitor volcanoes, find fossils, and track infectious diseases.

8 Big Ideas That Could Pave the Road to Clean Energy

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:25:00 -0600

Leading thinkers offer visions of how to make our energy supply cleaner, more efficient, and more abundant.

A Deep-Water Submersible That Can Switch to Autopilot

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:05:00 -0600

The Nereus can take orders through a 25-mile-long fiber-optic cable, but if that snaps, it can find its way back to the mother ship.

Lichens: Fungi That Have Discovered Agriculture

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:25:00 -0600

The often misunderstood symbiote can poison wolves, break down rocks, and live for thousands of years.

Vital Signs: An Uninvited Guest

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:55:00 -0600

The young woman carried a baby that wasn't her own—and wasn't even a human.

Visual Science: A Striking Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:55:00 -0600

Scientists at LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology used the university’s supercomputer to integrate wind, temperature, and sea surge simulations with satellite data.

The First, and Greatest, Reality Show: Evolutionary Biology

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:35:00 -0600

Image: Anurag Agrawal

Anne Gaskett, a Cornell University biologist, spends her days crouching quietly next to orchids in Australia. It may seem like an uneventful way to pass the time, but she is actually observing a marvelous act of sexual deception. The flowers are fooling wasps into making love to them.

Male wasps normally seek out females by sniffing for their pheromones, signaling chemicals that they produce. Each species makes a unique pheromone, which means that male wasps rarely end up with the wrong females. But the flowers that Gaskett studies, called tongue orchids, can produce a molecule that precisely mimics the pheromone made by the females of the species Lissopimpla excelsa, commonly known as dupe wasps. Male L. excelsa wasps pick up the scent of the orchids and race to the flowers, expecting to find a mate.

One day Gaskett was watching a wasp embracing an orchid. When the wasp finally flew away, she noticed a tiny drop of fluid on the flower. Evidently, the orchids had caused the wasps to ejaculate. The dupe wasps had truly been duped.

What seems to us like a practical joke is life and death to the tongue orchid. If it could not fool the wasps, the plant would become extinct. Tongue orchids can reproduce only when the pollen from one plant fertilizes the eggs of another. When a wasp tries to mate with a flower, it brushes against a packet of pollen. The pollen rubs off on the wasp, and the wasp deposits the grains on the next flower it engages.

The tongue orchid’s extreme style of deception is new to science, but it is just the latest twist in an evolutionary process Charles Darwin described 150 years ago. Natural selection, he realized, allows species to adapt to their environment. But environment is more than just physical conditions; a species also adapts to its biological environment. It may eat other species and be eaten in turn. It may cooperate with some species and be infected by others. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin used the metaphor of the “tangled bank” to illustrate the ways in which organisms depend on each other. It turns out that some species are even more entangled than he realized, so mutually dependent that they drive each other’s evolution. Biologists call this reciprocal change “coevolution.” It is now clear that coevolution has produced some of nature’s most extreme adaptations—and that it is also vital to the rise of the diversity of life.

Big Picture: The Banks That Prevent—Rather Than Cause—Global Crises

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:00 -0600

Every year farmers in flood-prone areas of Southeast Asia lose millions of tons of rice to high water that kills their crops. That colossal waste may soon be a thing of the past: SUB1A, a gene discovered by researchers with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the University of California, allows rice plants carrying the gene to live completely submerged for two weeks. Flood-resistant rice turned up among the 110,000 types of seed stored at the institute. It produced disappointingly low yields, but scientists were able to transfer the gene into more bountiful varieties. These have shown promising results in tests by growers in India and Bangladesh over the past two years.

This rice success story would not have been possible without the trove of genetic diversity tucked away in the IRRI’s vaults. As the world faces new agricultural challenges—shifting climate, bugs and diseases that have developed resistance to old defenses—such genetic resources are likely to become increasingly valuable. Fortunately, the IRRI is one of more than 1,000 organizations around the world (including the USDA, the International Potato Center in Peru, the Millennium Seed Bank in the U.K., and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway) cataloging and preserving crop genes. Most plant species grown for food have an associated bank that stores thousands of samples: seeds of landraces, wild relatives, and varieties that are rare, old, or adapted to very specific environments. The banks ensure that it will be possible to develop new varieties in the future.

Discover Magazine | Environment

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #37: Algae Might Be a Source of Clean, Renewable Diesel Fuel

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #9: Experimental Coal Plant Stashes CO2 Underground

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #22: Clear-Cutting Has a High Cost

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #30: Human Hunters Accelerate the Pace of Evolution

Numbers: Water, From Precipitation to Irrigation to Sanitation

Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google

8 Big Ideas That Could Pave the Road to Clean Energy

A Deep-Water Submersible That Can Switch to Autopilot

Lichens: Fungi That Have Discovered Agriculture

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #54: Seismic Waves Reveal the Thickness of Tectonic Plates: ~50 Miles

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #60: Geographer Mark Serreze

Vital Signs: An Uninvited Guest

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #65: Hot Climate Produced Giant, Croc-Eating Snake

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #66: Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the World

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #69: Science Sets Its Eyes on the Prize

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #71: First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #74: Hydrogen Energy Gets Two Big Boosts

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #77: Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids Lead to Life on Earth?

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #85: Fossilized Plankton Show the Effect of Fossil Fuels

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #91: The Strange Process That Made Earth's Oxygen

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #92: Nowhere to Hide From the Buzz of Civilization

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #94: Ecological Surgeons Perform Successful Species Transplant

Visual Science: A Striking Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

The First, and Greatest, Reality Show: Evolutionary Biology

Big Picture: The Banks That Prevent—Rather Than Cause—Global Crises